XII. CHEMICAL LABORATORY.
283. The Government Chemist, with a staff of two chemists and one assistant chemist to help him, is in charge of the chemical laboratory where commercial, medico-legal and biochemical work is carried out. In Annexure P will be found details of the year's work.
XIII. MEDICO-LEGAL.
284. The Medico-legal work continued under the direction of Dr. T. C. Pang, police surgeon and consisted in forensic work, laboratory work and lectures and demonstrations to police officers and medical students.
XIV. BIRTHS AND DEATHS REGISTER.
285. The registration of births and deaths and the administration of the Births and Deaths Registration Ordinance is under the control of the Director of Medical and Health Services. There is a central registry and a number of branch registries in different parts of the Colony and New Territories,
286. During the year considerable progress has been made in micro- filming those birth registers which are not already duplicated, 158 having been completed and 124 remaining to be done. There are, in all 757 birth registers, but 475 of these exist in duplicate.
287. There are 684 death registers, 298 of which exist in duplicate. No start has yet been made on micro-filming the death registers.
288. During the latter part of the period under review discussions were held with the District Commissioner of the New Territories with a view to introducing a procedure to make it easier to register births and to obtain copies of birth certificates in the New Territories.
289. Early in 1951, the Hollerith system for collecting and compiling statistics of mortality was introduced, and information was recorded by means of punched Hollerith cards covering age, sex, marital status, nationality, occupation, place of residence, place of death and cause of death, and also whether or not the deceased was a squatter, whether the dead body was sent to a mortuary, and the registration number of the attending doctor.
290. It is hoped, by the introduction of this system, to make available statistics of mortality for scientific purposes.
XV. ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
291. This will be the last annual report I shall write as Director of the Medical and Health Services of the Colony. I should like to take this opportunity of placing on record my appreciation of the co-operation that I have received from everybody in the department. During the four years I have been responsible for the direction of the department there has been steadily and, at times, rapidly increasing pressure on the facilities avail- able. This has meant many people working at high pressure and for longer periods than might normally be expected of them, but not only have these increased calls on their services been met by everybody cheer- fully, their enthusiasm has enabled me to introduce new services and to extend and improve those already in existence. Furthermore, when calls were made for economies there was all immediate appreciation of the position, and the heartbreaking business of abandoning favourite schemes was accepted cheerfully, and I was placed in the happy position of being able to select from among a number of suggested economies rather than having to force economies ou unwilling heads of sub-departments.
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I. NEWTON,
Director of Medical & Health Services.
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